Some historians and commentators have detected conspiratorial overtones in this episode and blame Stalin’s death on the decision not to call for medical help. This interpretation is doubtful. First, according to the doctors who performed the autopsy, Stalin’s stroke was the result of atherosclerosis that had been developing for years.4 Quick intervention would not have saved him. On the other hand, his fellow leaders could not have known this. They did not understand the implications of providing or withholding medical care, and their failure to summon doctors could have contained some malicious intent. Many Soviet leaders, in their hearts, surely did not wish their abusive leader long life. Nevertheless, less sinister explanations must also be considered. Stalin’s associates were simply afraid of intervening. They were not used to taking the initiative, and they knew Stalin’s suspicious and capricious nature all too well. During those days in early March, everyone involved—the bodyguards, Ignatiev, and the other members of the Five—behaved exactly as Stalin had trained them to behave. They tiptoed nervously forward, always looking over their shoulders and trying to shift as much responsibility as possible onto each other.
For many years, even Stalin’s closest associates and friends, people with whom he had shared long years of struggle, had lived under the constant threat of destruction. A dictator can only be sure of his power if those around him are at his mercy. After destroying the former opposition leaders, in 1937–1938 Stalin proceeded to have a significant portion of the Politburo shot. The close relatives of some of his surviving associates were also arrested or killed. The brother of Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich committed suicide, and Kalinin’s wife wound up in a camp.5 This suppression of potential oligarchs continued after the war. The Leningrad Affair did away with Nikolai Voznesensky and Aleksei Kuznetsov, two members of the younger generation who had risen to prominence under Stalin.6 Molotov’s wife was arrested around the same time. In the final months of his life, Stalin lashed out at Molotov and Mikoyan, essentially removing them from power. His death would provide the only guarantee against new purges.
At some point in their careers, virtually everyone in the top Soviet leadership had to endure a ritual of humiliation and repentance followed by renewed oaths of allegiance to the vozhd. Stalin would cast his comrades into disfavor only to later bring them back into the fold. He was generous with rebukes and liked to orchestrate verbal floggings in the press and at various meetings. And when he lost his temper, it was a horrifying sight to behold. Minister of Foreign Trade Mikhail Menshikov told of one instance when he incurred Stalin’s wrath during a meeting by failing to properly hear his question. “He gave me a furious look,” Menshikov recalled, “and launched a fat pencil at me as hard as he could, hurling it along the length of the table in my direction. For a moment everyone froze and waited to see what would happen next.”7 After Stalin’s death, Ignatiev complained about having been subjected to constant dressings-down: “Comrade Stalin reprimanded me using fouler language than I’d ever heard in my life and called me an idiot.”8 When the writer Konstantin Simonov attended the Central Committee plenum in October 1952, he was struck by the furious, “almost ferocious” and “unrestrained,” tone of Stalin’s speech denouncing Molotov and Mikoyan.9 Stalin’s temper and unpredictability, especially during his final years, were made worse by his declining health.
Top Soviet officials lived a golden-cage existence. While they exercised life-and-death power over their subordinates, they were at the constant mercy of their ultimate boss. Their security, transportation, incoming and outgoing correspondence, special telephone lines, dachas, and apartments—all were handled by state security, which was entirely under the dictator’s control. Such control meant that Stalin knew everything about how and with whom these officials spent their time. As if that were not enough, he apparently asked the secret police to install listening devices to spy on certain Politburo members.10
Despite the oppression of the collective leadership, periodic manifestations of oligarchy inevitably threatened Stalin’s sole power. Though very much under his thumb, his fellow leaders did enjoy a certain administrative autonomy as the heads of major government institutions, and they independently made many decisions of consequence for the running of the country. Furthermore, their authority expanded as Stalin’s physical frailty diminished his involvement in day-to-day decision making. Stalin was aware of this threat. Konstantin Simonov recorded a typical comment by the vozhd about his comrades, as reported by an eyewitness:
Even when differences remain, they will come to some agreement on paper and present the issue to me in that form.… The managers understand that I cannot know everything; all they want from me is a stamp with my signature. Yes, I cannot know everything, so I pay attention to differences, to objections, and I try to make sense of why they come up, where the real problem lies. The managers do their best to conceal these from me; they go along with the votes but they conceal the differences, all so that they can get a stamp with my signature. What they want out of me is my stamp.11
Stalin’s method for penetrating the defenses of this mutual protection society could best be described as scattershot. The dictator’s underlings never knew what question might suddenly interest him. They never knew whether Stalin would react to a particular decision and, if so, how or when. The constant threat of a random attack allowed him to keep the apparat and his close associates in a state of tension that helped to compensate for his lack of total control over them. The vozhd’s effort to maximize his power over his subordinates was helped by the number of channels through which he received information. The government and party bureaucracies, the courts, and state security all kept an eye on one another and constantly tried to prove their vigilance and effectiveness by denouncing one another to Stalin, zealously exposing others’ warts while concealing their own.
Repression, the constant threat of punishment, and Stalin’s temper and whims made the life of top Soviet officials almost as difficult as that of the powerless man or woman on the street. His “comrades” lived and worked under constant stress. One long-term Soviet diplomat left the following remembrance of the country’s minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Vyshinsky, one of Stalin’s most devoted and successful associates: “Vyshinsky was terrified of Stalin. Every Thursday he would go and report to him, and well beforehand, in anticipation of this encounter, his mood would sour. The closer it came to Thursday, the gloomier and more irritable he got.… But by Friday, when it was all behind him, he allowed himself to relax for a day or two. Experienced people knew that this was when it was best to report to him on the most complicated matters or approach him with requests of a personal nature.”12